I have to admit that I was completely wrong that time I…The sentence stared at her amongst the rest of the paragraph she had written, a rambling interlude that tried not only to explain why she had waited five years to try contacting him again, but to also apologise. Kitty was never good at apologies, not ones like this. How exactly did one go about apologising for such a wrong made against an individual? Crushing a person’s heart with the truth was one thing, and could deserve forgiveness, but she was responsible for much worse of a crime: knowingly crushing his heart when she wasn’t convinced of what she had said was true or not, so intentionally going along with what he said, on top of lying.
The lie…it was such a stupid lie. She wrapped her arms around her legs and placed her chin on her knee. Why lie? What reason did she have to lie? The only one she could come up with, and it took a few years of therapy to do that, was she was scared. Scared of loving Pete. It seemed crazy. Who was scared to love someone? Who found it easier to lie about love, and would rather have the inevitable happen sooner rather than risk it occurring later? That was it: inevitable. It was inevitable that they would fall out of love, or Pete would leave her (but not she left Pete). So, it actually got worse: She loved him; she lied about loving him and told him that she didn’t love him. She pushed him away and didn’t try to stop him when he left her. But she watched him leave. Watched him step onto the boat, watched him look back at the institute, back to her watching him. Watched him turn away, and watched him until his ship was no longer against the horizon. She stayed until the very end and watched as her own heart broke into a million little pieces. “I’m just not made for love.” It was something she had convinced herself of, and something she had told herself time and again.
A letter of admittance wouldn’t take back the years of bitter heartache which followed their breakup. It wouldn’t make anything better besides perhaps allowing a weight that had been pressing down on her for years to be released. But for Pete, she could have been just stirring up old demons that he would rather let be. “But I started this. I should be able to finish this.” She looked back at the blinking cursor.
There actually had been a small amount of time when she decided to give a relationship another shot. Seth said the right words, had the right moves. Secure, straight-forward, not to mention sexy. A man with a whiskey voice. But like many men who were like that, Seth didn’t have positive intentions. She had been a means to an end to him, a pawn in his people’s crusade. And more than that, a sexual conquest. His puppet with strings, owned and to be used by him as he pleased. It went against all of her better judgment, everything which she had held dear about herself. Her pride, her self-worth, all vanished when she gave in to her frustration and desperate desires.
Her level of emotional blame hit an all-time low then. She couldn’t look at her reflection in the eyes. There were some dark times in her recovery. A leave from active duty that extended longer than six months before she felt mentally equipped to deal with people, and even then she was a wreck. Rage had built into a massive firestorm that boiled and battled within her. With a refusal to even admit Seth’s existence, her anger focused itself on Pete. It was easy to twist the truth, to convince herself that it wasn’t she who made him leave, but he left on his own accord. He could have stopped himself from going all the way.
But that was Pete’s issue: if one pushes him away, he left, no further questions, no further words. And for her, he couldn’t even make himself different. Which was her problem: demanding too much when he couldn’t do it.
She pressed her palms against her eyes. She took in a breath and then started typing furiously:
agreed with you that I had never loved you, because it was the exact opposite. I love you, Pete. I love you. I hope you can one day forgive me for hurting you.She didn’t bother reading the words before moving the cursor to the 'x' button and did not save a new file.
bouncy
cheerful
giddy
blank